I dunno.... between hardware pricing and the scourge of console ports, it's really starting to feel like somebody out there is trying to finally cash in on their short sell position for PC gaming.......

Completely agree,and it sucks. Ram pricing is steadily up, CPUs are higher than historically, though atleast with ryzen/coffee lake it seems to be decent, coffee lake has no budget motherboards, ssd have come up price, and most dramatic change with GPUs. I know GPUs have also advanced the most, but the costs are pricing pc gaming out of the market.